On 08/01/2011 11:45 AM, Chris Mason wrote: > Excerpts from Josef Bacik's message of 2011-08-01 11:21:34 -0400: >> Hello, >> >> We've seen a lot of reports of people having these constant long pauses >> when doing things like sync or such. The stack traces usually all look >> the same, one is btrfs-transaction stuck in btrfs_wait_marked_extents >> and one is btrfs-submit-# stuck in get_request_wait. I had originally >> thought this was due to the new plugging stuff, but I think it just >> makes the problem happen more quickly as we've seen that 2.6.38 which we >> thought was ok will still have the problem happen if given enough time. >> >> I _think_ this is because of the way we write out metadata in the >> transaction commit phase. We're doing write_on_page for every dirty >> page in the btree during the commit. This sucks because basically we >> end up with one bio per page, which makes us blow out our nr_requests >> constantly, which is why btrfs-submit-# is always stuck in >> get_request_wait. What we need to do instead is use filemap_fdatawrite >> which will do a WB_SYNC_ALL but will do it via writepages, so hopefully >> we will get less bios and this problem will go away. Please try this >> very hastily put together patch if you are experiencing this problem and >> let me know if it fixes it for you. Thanks, > > I'm definitely curious to hear if this helps, but I think it might cause > a different set of problems. It writes everything that is dirty on the > btree, which includes a lot of things we've cow'd in the current > transaction and marked dirty. They will have to go through COW again > if someone wants to modify them again. > But this is happening in the commit after we've done all of our work, we shouldn't be dirtying anything else at this point right? > The btrfs writepage code does this: > > ret = __extent_writepage(page, wbc, &epd); > > extent_write_cache_pages(tree, mapping, &wbc_writepages, > __extent_writepage, &epd, flush_write_bio); > flush_epd_write_bio(&epd); > Yeah but nr_to_write is 1, so after the __extent_writepage it will be 0 and extent_write_cache_pages will just return since there's nothing to write, so we'll still end up with 1 page at a time being written out. Thanks, Josef -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
